TY - JOUR
AU - Bloom,Nicholas
AU - Genakos,Christos
AU - Sadun,Raffaella
AU - Reenen,John Van
TI - Management Practices Across Firms and Countries
JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL - No. 17850
PY - 2012
Y2 - February 2012
DO - 10.3386/w17850
UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17850
L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17850.pdf
N1 - Author contact info:
Nicholas Bloom
Stanford University
Department of Economics
579 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305-6072
Tel: 650/725-3266
Fax: 650/725-5702
E-Mail: nbloom@stanford.edu
Christos Genakos
Department of Economics
Athens University of Economics and Business
76 Patission Str.
Athens, 10434
GREECE
Tel: (+30) 210 8203 353
E-Mail: cgenakos@aueb.gr
Raffaella Sadun
Harvard Business School
Morgan Hall 233
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
Tel: 617/495-6190
Fax: 617/495-0355
E-Mail: rsadun@hbs.edu
John Van Reenen
MIT Sloan School of Management
100 Main Street, E62-427
Cambridge, MA 02142
E-Mail: vanreene@mit.edu
AB - For the last decade we have been using double-blind survey techniques and randomized sampling to construct management data on over 10,000 organizations across twenty countries. On average, we find that in manufacturing American, Japanese, and German firms are the best managed. Firms in developing countries, such as Brazil, China and India tend to be poorly managed. American retail firms and hospitals are also well managed by international standards, although American schools are worse managed than those in several other developed countries. We also find substantial variation in management practices across organizations in every country and every sector, mirroring the heterogeneity in the spread of performance in these sectors. One factor linked to this variation is ownership. Government, family, and founder owned firms are usually poorly managed, while multinational, dispersed shareholder and private-equity owned firms are typically well managed. Stronger product market competition and higher worker skills are associated with better management practices. Less regulated labor markets are associated with improvements in incentive management practices such as performance based promotion.
ER -